The goal of this project is to bring the power of
mathematical expression to as many people as possible, and as
quickly and easily as possible. The proposed medium is a semantic
expression notation called MINSE designed for this purpose. But
a language alone is not enough: with this design comes a deployed
implementation that immediately makes expressions a reality for
the scientific and mathematical Internet community.

This implementation shows that it's possible even without any
support from browser software. You can insert mathematical expressions
directly into your HTML and have them displayed like the image
here, which is an example of the output from the prototype renderer.

View a page containing MINSE now! Just enter the URL here:

Location:

Using mathematical and scientific
expressions in your Web pages is as easy as typing them in!
See a demo.
The program
which renders expressions is an Internet mediator
service, which will perform renderings in real-time.
The service has been available to the public since 2 June 1996.

This means that if you put expressions in your documents, they
will be accessible to everyone on the Internet, no matter
what Web-browsing software they are using. You don't have to
install any software, and neither do they.

Moreover, because the notation is semantic, expressions can be
rendered to a variety of media, bringing an unprecedented degree
of accessibility to mathematics. Efforts have been made
to keep the design general enough to apply in other contexts, like
chemistry, physics, and economics.

(When the rest of the Web catches up, we
won't need to use mediators to convert everything. However, mediators
are what make this kind of rapid prototyping and deployment possible.)

Ka-Ping Yee.
The design of the semantic and rendering languages and the
implementation of the mediation service was done over
about five months while I was an undergraduate at the
University of Waterloo, on exchange in Japan.
The project grew out of frustration and impatience
with the lack of mathematical support in popular World-Wide Web
browsers. Sample output from Maple and TEX was studied to tune
the graphical rendering, and some of the ideas used for audio rendering
came from T. V. Raman's amazing
AsTeR
system.